my health journey… that sounds really dumb to me, but i can’t think of any other way to word it. ;)

Just so you know, this has not been a easy road to being thin. I didn’t just lose weight and then went back to my old life at eating whatever i felt like.

I’ll start from the beginning. Growing up, i never felt uncomfortable with my body, at least not more than average. I’m just being perfectly honest! As I became an adult, things changed. One year, i gained 5 lbs…the next year it was 10 lbs more on top of that…the next year it was 15 lbs more! I started feeling very uncomfortable with my body and wondering what had happened! Horribly enough, i was getting mean comments about my weight. People are cruel!

Anyways, I hated exercise, but i had enough of feeling uncomfortable with my body. I started working out daily, but i was almost starving myself. I was eating nothing but fruits and bread! I lost 5 lbs on the scale, but i could swear i looked bigger.

Thank god my mom helped me. She said something like, “by starving yourself and eating those foods you’re eating, you will lose a little bit of weight, but it’s your muscle, which is heavier, turning into fat. Let me help you to know the RIGHT foods to eat, so you can eat more and lose weight.” I was skeptical, but she ran me through this book called ‘Dr. Ann’s 10-step diet’. It’s not gimmicks, it just teaches you what the right foods are to have a healthy lifestyle, written by a nutritionist! Instead of 400 calories of fruits and breads, i ate about 1000 calories of veggies and protein (chicken, eggs, and more) and lost 30 lbs and kept it off! It still wasn’t a completely easy road.

In 2010 I lost 25 lbs (from 140 to 115 lbs), but i fluctuated so much after i lost it. I kept on binging and dieting, binging and dieting, and i was worried that my whole life would consist of binging and dieting. i can see how girls become anorexic, because the high of losing weight on the scale was so high and the depression i felt when i suddenly gained 5 lbs felt so low. I struggled with that that whole year.

In 2011 I got down to 110, the weight i was when i was 18. I still struggled with gaining and losing, but i was learning to stabilize it a little. i got better at not binging and being more balanced in general. I kept on trying to learn more information. That was good, but it still was really hard to maintain my weight.

This year i have learned the importance of protein! I was not eating a lot of protein before, because i know it stays in your body longer. But I realized my low-protein diet was WHY the scale kept jumping up again. I was skinny, but i didn’t have enough muscle. The more muscle you have, the faster your metabolism is and your body has more ability to burn fat (this is why it is so much easier for boys)! So, it could take longer to lose weight while eating a healthy amount of protein, but it has been so worth it cause my body stays more the same! I don’t overload protein and i am not building muscle or anything. Toning exercises (so many good exercise people on youtube, blogilates being my favorite) have made me have a better body shape. So much has changed, because now i LOVE exercise! Especially running.

Also, this year i have been learning about eating clean and incorporating it into my life. “Eating Clean” means avoiding all processed foods. This sounds very ‘hippie’, but it’s all about eating what is naturally put on this earth (fruits, veggies, meat, nuts, whole grains) and not eating the man-made addicting foods that are killing America. That sounds dramatic, but it’s true. I have not gotten CLOSE to perfecting clean eating, but I am working on it slowly but surely, adding new foods to my diet, and slowly taking the bad foods out. But I have seen AMAZING results from this. Literally, the fat covering my muscles is just melting away. I’m finding that i’m having to TRY NOT to lose weight. I think that by eating what we were meant to eat as humans, we look how we were meant to look.

This has been a long learning process for me about my body. And I’m still learning, listening, and reading. I hope to keep getting better and better at it this. I want to learn to live cleaner every year. I want to live a long healthy life and get to grow old with my husband. I want to feel good and look beautiful and i don’t think there is anything wrong with that. :)